Analysis of Metadiscourse Features in Argumentative Writing by Pakistani Undergraduate Students

Metadiscourse involves the interaction between the reader and the writer of the text in the overall process of communication. Metadiscourse not only guides the reader to understand the primary message of the text through structure and content, but also it intimates the reader with the particular slants and perspectives in the primary discourse. The students have to master the use of Metadiscourse in their writings. The purpose of this study is to examine the distribution and frequency of Metadiscourse features used by Pakistani undergraduate students in their argumentative essays and to analyze roles played by these particular features. Moreover, the research explores the extent of appropriateness and inappropriateness in this particular text as well. Hyland’s Interpersonal model of Metadiscourse (2005) was adapted to conduct the present study. AntConc 3.4.4 software is used for corpus analysis of the text. Findings show that Pakistani undergraduate students are more comfortable with using Interactional Metadiscourse 61% rather than Interactive dimension 39%. It has been observed that undergraduate students used high score of self-mentions 37% and engagement markers 37%. Endophoric markers were not used by these students 0%. Findings have considerable importance, as they assist the learners to figure out the problems of the students regarding the use of Metadiscourse. Trainings should be given to the students to use these features appropriately.


Introduction
Human discourse either in written or oral form is not merely a means of information sharing or exchanges of views. A primary concern for any text is its understandability and acceptability as comprehensible text. In order to achieve this understandability level, the readers have to be motivated, engaged, and involved in the text and influenced by this discourse. On the other hand, every reader has his/her own affiliations, expectations, experiences and contextual knowledge with which he encounters any text. The complex process of the production of the text interacts with the readers' experiences and expectations. Metadiscourse devices are often used by the producers of texts to fulfill this level of expectation.
Hence, Metadiscourse can be described as a device that paves way towards comprehension of a language being used. It reflects writer's attempt to guide a reader's perception about text. So, alongwith being a source of information, communication, is also about exchange of personalities, attitudes, and assumptions (Harris, 1959).
Metadiscourse is an important way to facilitate communication, support a situation and position, increase readability and develop an association with readers through different items (Hyland, 2000). These items are collectively called Metadiscourse. Metadiscourse features are determined by such factors as the number of readers, the degree of closeness between the interlocutors and their relative status, and the amount of shared background knowledge about the topics.
The present research explores Metadiscourse features in argumentative essays written by Pakistani undergraduate students. The descriptive framework of Metadiscourse presented in this research arises from corpus analysis of 124 argumentative essays which were written by Pakistani undergraduate students. The purpose of the research is to explore the understanding and exposure of using Metadiscourse features by the respondents especially along the design and patterns of academic writing especially argumentative writing.

Statement of Problem
Currently a lot of work is done on the evaluation of the use of Metadiscourse features by non-native learners in Iran, China and Malaysia. A few studies that that are conducted by Lu (2011), Anwardeen (2013), Rahmat (2015) and Asghar (2015) investigate the use of Metadiscourse features in Research Articles, Ph.D dissertations and text books across different disciplines. Pakistani students learn in a different socio-cultural environment. They employ many transferable strategies in the use of Metadiscourse. How far Pakistani undergraduate students conform to the standard norms of academic Metadiscourse, has not been investigated yet.

Statement of Purpose
The purpose of the study is to identify the use of Metadiscourse features by undergraduate students in argumentative essays. The data has been collected from 124 argumentative essays written by Pakistani students. The present study has analysed the frequency of use of Metadiscourse features, their functions in these essays.

Research Questions
This study has answered the following questions: 1) What kind of Metadiscourse features have been used by the sample population in their writing?
2) What are the most and least frequent Metadiscourse features that have been used in the participants' writing?
3) What roles do these Metadiscourse features play in the text produced by the participants? 4) How far the use of Metadiscourse features in the text is appropriate?

Significance of the Study
This study is a pioneering work on the use of Metadiscourse features by undergraduate learners in argumentative essays. The study has high pedagogical relevance, since it would contribute to syllabus designing, error analysis, remedial work and right adaptation of teaching techniques for the teaching of Metadiscourse features in writing and more specifically in argumentative essays. Moreover, it would facilitate the learners to evaluate their drawbacks and to improve their sub-skills as well. This study will be helpful for researchers working in the field of Metadiscourse features of Argumentative essays.

Literature Review
Features of Metadiscourse have been examined in different academic writing, editorials as well as in cross-cultural studies. Barton (1995) conducted a research on argumentative essays to examine the functions of Metadiscourse features which involve arguments and counter-arguments. In this work, contrastive and non-contrastive functions of Metadiscourse markers were also taken into account. The results displayed that contrastive and non-contrastive connections worked as an interactional Metadiscourse makers, which made the counter-arguments softer and stress on claims. Hyland (1999) investigated a comparative study to analyze Metadiscourse features used by tertiary students in research articles and introductory textbooks. The results have shown that textual Metadiscourse was used more frequently in both the text types but the research articles contained more interpersonal Metadiscourse. Research articles are argumentative by their very nature, so they require more use of interpersonal Metadiscourse features to set a path to interact with reader in best way. Xu (2001) compared the writings of 200 university students studying a 4 years program in English. The results showed that students in the final two years had a better and sound knowledge of the use of Metadiscourse than students in the first two years. The essays of senior students were more coherent and less personal. The junior students lacked a firm grasp over their writings and they were not able to make the best use of Metadiscourse.
Likewise, Abdollahzadeh (2003) investigated discussion and conclusion sections of 65 articles. 33 articles were written by the Iranian researchers in English and 32 articles were written by the native speakers of English. Findings showed that there was more use of certainty and attitude markers by the native English writers than the Iranians. Lu (2011) conducted a research in order to analyze the use of Metadiscourse and genre learning in English argumentative writings written by Chinese undergraduate students. For this purpose the high rated essays were separated from the low rated essays and the use of Metadiscourse was studied in the essays. It was found that there was little or no consistency in the use of Metadiscourse elements in the argumentative genre of the essay.
Secondly the use of Metadiscourse in order to guide the reader through the development of arguments was only seen in the high rated essays. Anwardeen (2013) conducted a research on argumentative writing in order to examine the efficiency and competence of the college students of Malaysia in the format of argumentative writing. This study was conducted with the aim of the analysis of the distribution and the frequent usage of the Metadiscourse elements used by a certain set of students in the argumentative essays. Findings revealed that "also" was the most commonly used logical connector and "accordingly" and "consequently" were least used. Rahmat (2015) conducted a research in Malaysia on pieces of argumentative writings which followed both qualitative and quantitative approaches to analyze the use of Metadiscourse in them. Eight diploma students were selected for this research from the disciplines of engineering (sciences) and business (non-sciences). The results showed that although writers from both the groups used all the Metadiscourse resources but the business students made more use of code glosses and engineering students made frequent use of transitions.
The significance of the use of Metadiscourse has been well established in the field of academic writing. It has been adopted as an important practice in many universities around the world. This research has reviewed some of those researches carried out in China, Iran and Malaysia. The present research focuses the Metadiscourse features and markers in the argumentative essays of the Pakistani learners to give valuable suggestions for the improvement.

Methodology
The present research benefited from the Mixed Research method. Quantitative analysis is conducted to find out the frequency of Metadiscourse features and their variations used in the corpus. On the other hand, qualitative analysis is done to analyze the roles played by these Metadiscourse, evaluation and interpretation of these features in Pakistani learner's Argumentative essays.

The Corpus
PCSAW (Pakistani Corpus of Students, Argumentative writing) is corpus that is used in this study. PCSAW consists of written data that was produced by undergraduate university students (B.S students in English) who have just completed their secondary education. The essays written for this study are argumentative in nature. The corpus for this study is written by 124 students from English Department, Government College University Faisalabad. These students are with different L1 and their ages are from 18-20 years. This written corpus contains 124 essays that consist of 31873 Tokens and 3188 Types.

Statistical Tool
A software named as AntConc 3.4.4 developed by Anthony (2016) was used to analyse the Metadiscourse features in essays written by Pakistani undergraduate university students. AntConc is the freeware concordance software. Boréus & Bergström (2017) rate it as the best known QDA software. This software makes vertical reading possible through concordance lines and it can calculate the word frequencies as well.

Theoretical Framework
Ever since Metadiscourse has emerged as a significant area of interest, various models have been presented to explain the use of Metadiscourse in writing. This research has adopted the Hyland's model of Metadiscourse which was presented in Ken Hyland's book "Metadiscourse-Exploring Interaction in writing". This book was first published in 2005. Hyland has presented a comprehensive and elaborate model for the use of Metadiscourse which has been brought into practice by many researchers. The third research question is about the role played by Metadiscourse features. The results show that there is more use of Self-mentions and Engagement markers by Pakistani learners in Argumentative essays. On the other hand, their moderate occurrences are found in other studies which I have reviewed. Self-mentions are the writer's presence in the text. This is the way of self-representation of the writer's presence. As the argumentative essays are concerned, self-mentions are used with conscious choice. According to the findings, Pakistani learners are proved to be very easy with using self-mentions and engagement markers. Pakistani undergraduates have not only kept themselves active in the text while writing argumentative essays but also engaged the readers with the text by using the engagement markers.
Writer's choice of "I" and "We" discloses the decision on his part to take the stance and adopt different roles in his/her propositional material. "I" is the first person singular pronoun; they are used by one person to mention him or herself. "I" is actually invisible to reader. "We" is the first person plural pronoun, which is used in nominative case in modern English to refer oneself. Besides this, the purpose of writing in first person is to create an intimate bond with the reader as it is the sub-category of Interactional Metadiscourse which is responsible of reader's engagement with writer.
Examples from participant's writing: 1) I am waiting for your reply.
2) We want to discuss the ways to improve the education system.
Most frequently used engagement markers are "you" and "Your". Writers by using engagement markers perform two functions, first they fulfill reader's expectations about the text and second they allot a specific position to the reader to guide them to interpret, understand and evaluate the text. Similarly through these devices, the writers anticipate and respond to potential objections raised in the minds of the readers to avoid disputes. They clearly address the reader. Sometimes they selectively emphasize their attention, and sometimes by using second person pronoun, questions forms, asides and imperatives include the readers as participants in the text.
Engagement markers are used by writers to address clearly and focus their concentration to the given statement and argument and at the same time involve them as a direct participants in the text by using pronouns (inclusive we, you, your).
"You" is second person personal pronoun. In modern English, it is used both in singular and plural cases. Moreover, "you" is used as a nominative and in oblique case as well. Examples are given below. I want to share my tension and problem with you.

1) As you know Pakistan is not a developed country.
2) I want to share my problem with you.
"Your" is second person plural pronoun in modern English. "Your" is a form of possessive case of you. "Your" is used as an attributive adjective. Examples of both words "You" and "Your" are given below.
1) Please reply me and discuss your opinion.
2) I received your letter last Sunday.
Attitude marker is one of the Interactional Metadiscourse sub-categories in Hyland's model. Attitude marker is used less frequently by Pakistani learners and the function of these markers is to convey the writer's attitude and behavior to the written text or ideational material. The competent writers have productive capability in using attitude markers in their Argumentative essays. Consequently, it is essential that students should be trained more on using Attitude markers to produce an effective argumentative essay. By doing this, students would be able to produce decent and assertive Argumentative essays.
In this research, two words "I think" and "I believe" are used frequently in these argumentative essays. "I think" ijel.ccsenet.org Vol. 7, No. 6;2017 and "I believe" are expressions of modality. According to Halliday (1994), modality has two orientations: objective and subjective. For the purpose to claim explicitly the probability is objective (it is likely, probably) and on the other hand, for the purpose to state explicitly, the probability is subjective (I think, I believe). These attitude markers are semantically related to the clauses and discourse and can be used as comment markers to indicate the writer's evaluation about the text. It means instead of giving comments, these markers performs the function of evaluation. "I Think" and "I believe" are subjective, for this reason, writer must be very confident in his/her writing about what he /she thinks and believe. Mostly this type of attitude markers is used in a situation where writer want to express his/ her opinion but do not want him/her in dominant position. By doing this, writer can have great effect on the communication. Attitude markers are used as a mitigating device, to strengthen the argument. Examples of these words are given below.
1) I think that young generation can play an important role to overcome this bad situation.
2) I believe lack of education is an important cause of poverty.
Examples show that these attitude markers weaken and strengthen the force of the statement or argument. Pakistani undergraduate students should be trained to use attitude markers in writing Argumentative essays as attitude markers would help the writer to convey the information with confidence to the readers. It is very important for the authors to express their information with confidence in Argumentative essays for the purpose to persuade and convince the readers to make them agree with writer's point of view.
Hedges and Boosters are also used by Pakistani Undergraduates with 422 and 254 frequency. Hedges contribute 13.4% and Boosters 8.1% in total. As hedges are uncertainty markers and boosters are opposite to them, and frequency of hedges is more in comparison with boosters which is not good for effective writing.
Hedges are uncertainty markers and Boosters play a role exactly opposite to hedges. These are used to close down alternatives and conflicting views. They bring certainty by narrowing down the diversity of the opinion and show the commitment of the author to the contentment of the text. Although, Boosters is very less researched category of Metadiscourse in academic writing. On the other hand, it is significant key aspect of rhetorical persuasion especially in the case of argumentative essays. Boosters are communicative strategies which increase the force of statement, accepted truth, certainty, strong commitment and conviction.
Students should be clear and confident about their point of views in Argumentative writings. If they are uncertain and not clear, they would not be able to produce powerful and authentic arguments. Boosters are not used more to produce original coherent text. Pakistani students are proved to be not convenient with usage of Boosters in comparison with Malaysian students whose writings were examined by Tan & Eng (2014). It could be seen that Pakistani undergraduate learners should be given more training in using Attitude markers and boosters. They need to strike a healthy balance in the use of hedges and in writing argumentative essays. As for as the Boosters are concerned which are used frequently in argumentative essays are words "know" and 'think". "know" is a special type of booster that is used as an expression to express that writers believe that the fact is true he/she is discussing about. There can be a possibility that writer could be mistaken.
Examples from the student's writings: 1) I am glad to know that you have established your own business.
2) As you know I am elder daughter of parents.
Inappropriate use of Metadiscourse features has been found in the argumentative essays by undergraduate students. It is suggested that teachers must polish the students to use the boosters in their writings to fill the communication gap between the writer and reader. Students must use an appropriate amount of boosters to boost their confidence in their writings to make the text reader-friendly in order to develop a stronger interaction with the reader.  (Hyland, 2005).This dimension shows writer's awareness about the oratorical expectations, knowledge, understanding abilities and interests of listeners. Code glosses provide assistance at the point where reader has a problem and require assistance and guidance to interpret the text. Here in argumentative essays they are performing the functions of elaboration, clarification, exemplification and specification. Elaboration has two more functions: exemplification and reformulation.
Code glasses provide assistance to create organized and reader friendly text (Hyland, 2005). Communicative purpose of author is exemplified by code glosses.
Examples from Pakistani student's writings: 1) I must say that, first of all there must be socialism.
2) There are a lot of causes, such as people do suicide because of money.
It is recommended that, training should be given to the students to use more code glosses to assist the readers to hold and understand the full meaning of the written text. Analysis shows that words like "say" and "that is" are used most frequently when the students wanted to express their opinions about something and when they wanted to explain something with the help of examples. ESL teachers are required to enhance the vocabulary of the L2 learners, to help them produce a decent Argumentative essay. This will help the learners to avoid the repetition and redundancies in their writings.
Frame marker is very important feature that plays significant role in organizing a text. Frame makers are of many types and perform functions according to their nature to create coherence in the text to make the text understandable for the reader. According to Hyland's model of Metadiscourse (2005), frame markers are responsible to draw the boundaries across the text. They are used to sequence the discourse, label the various stages of the text, and announce the discourse goals and to predict or indicate the shift of topics during the discourse.
Examples from Pakistani student's writings: "So" is a conjunction and according to Hyland (2005), indicate the shift of a topic in the discourse. "So" is a word which doesn't add explicit meaning to the argument you are giving but it marks the writer's special place in the discourse. Below the examples are given. 1) So, the dowry system should be ended.
2) You are living in village, so you are not suffering from this problem.
According to Morgan (2011) "Want to" is considered as a frame marker which is always used to announce the goals. Moreover, it is most hassle free and very simple frame marker which is used to convey the direct meaning of the word. Below are the examples of "want to". 1) I want to share my tension and problem with you.
2) They want to get jobs and earn money for their better lifestyle.
The corpus exploration showed that the Evidentials have been used rarely. Evidential have only 36 hits in 124 essays. They contribute only 2% in total. According to their nature they are very important in organizing a coherent text. From the perspective of Argumentative essays, evidentials are used to give the evidences to strengthen their arguments. Evidentials distinguish the other persons, other than the writers himself.
Evidentials are used with less frequency as in other countries. 1). As cited in his book.
2). According to Islam, we should establish a system.
A little usage of this category has been found like those studies which have been reviewed in Literature review section. Only 6 types are used in these essays which is not appropriate. It is suggested that teachers must give attention to students to teach them the appropriate use of Metdiscourse features according to the situation. In other words, situational use of Metadiscourse features should be taught them to make them competent to produce coherent text.
The last research question was about the appropriateness of Metadiscourse features. It has been observed that the students were not fully aware of the usage of Metadiscourse features. Pakistani undergraduate learners are basically involved in grammatical aspects of writing. Their handling of Metadiscourse markers shows the need for more training. They committed errors while using them as an adverb or prepositions in their argumentative essays. This shows limited and inefficient knowledge of Pakistani undergraduates in using Metadiscourse features. Moreover, they tend to use most of the Metadiscourse features in broken and grammatically incorrect sentences.
Some examples of errors commited by Pakistani students: 1) Poor people never success in life.
2) I am there last night.
3) According to me, poverty shall enhance day by day.

4) Dowry now a days is become dangerous for poor people
The readers will be unable to understand the fragments and broken sentences if the information is not completely transmitted to them. Moreover, while using Metadiscourse features in their writings, they are not able to use correct tenses in their Argumentative essays. In order to enhance the competence of Metadiscourse features in Pakistani learners, ESL teachers should start the programs to improve the situation. Additional practice in grammar exercises may build more confidence in the learners. ESL teachers are also considered as very important to keep the check and balance on how the Pakistani undergraduates use Metadiscourse in their writings instead of only elaborating the features and functions of Metadiscourse. ESL teachers are required to ensure that the learners could use the Metadiscourse markers in various genres.

Conclusion
In sum, Pakistani learners did not use all the types of Metadiscourse features in their argumentative writings. Pakistani students pursuing higher studies at universities need to be properly trained in the use of Metadiscourse in documenting their research. A tendency for repetition of the same phrases has been noted in the writings of Pakistani learners. "Lack of appropriate vocabulary" has been observed as one of reasons for not creating effective and persuasive argumentative essays. Trainings and exercises are required to improve the use of Metadiscourse features in their writings. Undergraduate students are suggested to use more interactional Metadiscourse in order to interact with the reader and to engage the readers in their writing. It is suggested that Hedges should be used less frequently to produce effective argumentative essays. Suggested framework in this study could help the ESL teachers to realize which Metadiscourse should be taught to the students in writing argumentative essays. The present research has highlighted the importance of Metadiscourse in argumentative essays written by the students.